Management Information System (MIS) for schools
Data and Insight | The Data Drop
Category : Blog
Welcome to The Data Drop. Our philosophy at Arbor is that staff should have direct, easy access to their data – and be able to do something meaningful with it. Our MIS is built on a world-class data platform, which allows us to deliver things like national-level benchmarking to schools and trusts within seconds, rather
Welcome to The Data Drop. Our philosophy at Arbor is that staff should have direct, easy access to their data – and be able to do something meaningful with it. Our MIS is built on a world-class data platform, which allows us to deliver things like national-level benchmarking to schools and trusts within seconds, rather than hours or days. And allows schools to make real-time, data-driven decisions.
This new series is designed to share insights from our data warehouse (containing the data of c.4,000 schools), to shed light on the wider patterns emerging across the education sector.
–
In a post-Covid world, and also in a year marked by strikes and an emphasis on staff wellbeing, we thought we’d use our first blog in our Data Drop series to take a look at staff absence data.
When looking at staff absence data based on the last five academic years between 1st September – 24th April (in order to be comparable to the 22/3 dataset at time of publication), there’s a significant downward trend in regards to sickness-related absences in school staff – but only when it comes to absences that have not been certified.
Only 26.8% of recorded staff absences in the academic year 2022-3 were as a result of sickness (certification unknown), dropping from 37.8% the previous year. This is a further jump from pre-Covid; in the academic year 2018-19, the proportion of working days lost attributed to sickness (certification unknown) was 46.7%.
By contrast, there has been a rise in other types of sickness absence since 2018. This is the case where absence has been medically certified as well as self-certified.
The other absence category which is seeing an unsurprising spike this academic year is absences related to strike action. In 22/23, 2.3% of working days missed were related to strikes. The proportion of working days missed by strikes has sat below 0.1% across the previous four years.
This equates to 41,193 days lost so far (to 24/04/2023) in 22/23 (across 3,631 many schools from where we drew this dataset), compared with a combined total of 260.5 days across the previous four years. Whilst these stats must also take into account the change in number of Arbor’s schools which make up the data, the difference is still notable. You can see more of Arbor’s data around the strikes in our work with SchoolsWeek here.
Periods covered – we’ve chosen to use these dates so that we have a comparable dataset to the 22/23 year at time of writing (May 2023).
22-23: 01/09/2022 – 24/04/2023
21-22: 01/09/2021 – 24/04/2022
20-21: 01/09/2020 – 24/04/2021
19-20: 01/09/2019 – 24/04/2020
18-19: 01/09/2018 – 24/04/2019
Staff absence is recorded using startdate, enddate and working days lost in between. Due to school holidays this is difficult to split days into the correct periods for long-term absence. Startdate has been used as an approximation for the academic year of the absence. The calculations attribute all working days lost to the period the startdate falls into.
The number of schools in our dataset varies year on year, which is why we have drawn on the percentage of days lost rather than number. Below you will find the number of schools in each year’s dataset.
18/19 – 3,385
19/20 – 3,424
20/21 – 3,503
21/22 – 3,611
22/3 – 3,631
This represents approximately 10% of the schools in the UK.
At Arbor, we’re on a mission to help schools make the most out of their data. Not yet using our MIS? Find out more here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.